For decades, the story of public health in Africa has been told in five-year chapters, which is the typical lifespan of a donor grant. In this cycle, we implement with urgency and report with diligence, but all too often, we watch as the “lessons learned” are filed away in digital archives or lost when project staff transition.
The critical choice is whether we allow progress to fade when a project ends, or deliberately build a capability that endures. Anchored within the World Bank funded Health Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Resilience (HEPRR-MPA), this approach represents a strategic shift from time-bound, isolated interventions to a durable regional knowledge system that continues to generate value long after individual funding cycles close and experts transition.
The East, Central, and Southern Africa region is extraordinarily rich in experience and innovation. Across our countries, teams are solving real problems every day fixing diagnostic bottlenecks, strengthening laboratories, improving surveillance, and making systems work under pressure. Yet for too long, this learning has remained trapped in fragmentation..
One country may crack a complex challenge in its laboratory system, while a neighbouring country, unaware of that progress, spends years and scarce resources trying to solve the very same problem from scratch. We can no longer afford this “fragmentation trap” where every country learns in a vacuum.
The Learning Agenda, led by East, Central and Southern Africa Health Community (ECSA-HC) and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), is a deliberate response to this challenge. It provides a regional blueprint for turning individual country experiences into shared regional assets. It ensures that progress made in Angola, Kenya, or Mozambique is not just an isolated success, but a shared building block for a more resilient continent. It is an admission that while individual interventions save lives, only shared institutionalized knowledge can sustain entire health systems. By capturing what works, sharing it systematically, and embedding learning into how we prepare for and respond to health emergencies, the region moves from reacting to crises to building enduring capacity together.
At its core, this agenda moves beyond the traditional goal of academic publication to focus on the practical application of evidence. We are positioning learning as a core operational pillar, turning the papers and reports generated during implementation into standardized policy briefs that speak the language of decision-makers.
At its core, this agenda moves beyond the traditional goal of academic publication to focus on the practical application of evidence. We are positioning learning as a core operational pillar, turning the papers and reports generated during implementation into standardized policy briefs that speak the language of decision-makers.
By revitalizing our Communities of Practice (CoPs), we are building a “brain trust” of experts who collaborate across borders on collaborative surveillance, laboratory diagnostics, and antimicrobial resistance. This structured approach ensures that information is not just collected but is actively used to guide the design of future projects and to scale up interventions that have been proven to work in our local contexts.
Sustainability is the ultimate measure of our success. By launching a Regional Digital Learning Hub and building research capacity within National Public Health Institutes, we are ensuring that ten years from now, the next generation of health leaders will find a robust institutional memory waiting for them. We are working to embed research and learning into the day-to-day business of primary healthcare facilities so that those who generate data are also empowered to use it. When we link our research outputs to financing mechanisms and national work plans, we move from a state of project-dependency to one of self-sustaining evidence-based governance.
Knowledge is only truly powerful when it is organized, accessible, and actionable. As we implement the HEPRR-MPA project over the next five years, our goal is to ensure that the lessons of today become the foundation for the resilient health systems of tomorrow.
The era of “implement and forget” is not an option. Through this Learning Agenda, we are building a legacy of knowledge because we recognize that a region that learns together is a region that can withstand any future health emergency together. It is time to turn our implementation process into our greatest teacher.